Teacher Planning for Writing Instruction One of the things I have discovered observing children's writing strategies is how closely these mirror their reading strategy use. We have always given lip service to the reciprocal nature of reading and writing, however I was at a loss to clarify how I could make this work in practice and help the readers and writers in my class see this link. We have separated communicative processes into times of the day, reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, news (oral language), visual language. The way I organised my teaching and classrooms has prevented me from seeing how all of these processes can support the development of larger language concepts.
The Ministry of Education Literacy Progressions have provided me a with a place to start organising my teaching and classroom in a different way. I took all of the bigger ideas, concepts about written language conventions and placed these between the reading and writing strategies. I can now help students build their concepts of language through use of these in both processes. As they learn to control strategies for the processes, they must use concepts about written language. Therefore, I ensure that the tasks in both processes link to similar concepts about written language. Concepts are not targeted one at at time, as with objectives, they are taught as and when they are relevant the the child's involvement in the real tasks of reading and writing. Then I can model and support writing as a constant and complex system of decision making and problem solving with all of the resources learners have available.
The marking key guide below is to make your life easier. Use highlighters to select one part of the work you like (write why) and one part for their attention. Expect that this will be fixed (or at least looked at again) by them before you see them next. This template is the coding sheet to go in the front of their book, I use pink for (I like) and green for (look again). The children editing their own and their buddies work with a yellow highlighter.
One of the things I have discovered observing children's writing strategies is how closely these mirror their reading strategy use. We have always given lip service to the reciprocal nature of reading and writing, however I was at a loss to clarify how I could make this work in practice and help the readers and writers in my class see this link. We have separated communicative processes into times of the day, reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, news (oral language), visual language. The way I organised my teaching and classrooms has prevented me from seeing how all of these processes can support the development of larger language concepts.
The Ministry of Education Literacy Progressions have provided me a with a place to start organising my teaching and classroom in a different way. I took all of the bigger ideas, concepts about written language conventions and placed these between the reading and writing strategies. I can now help students build their concepts of language through use of these in both processes. As they learn to control strategies for the processes, they must use concepts about written language. Therefore, I ensure that the tasks in both processes link to similar concepts about written language. Concepts are not targeted one at at time, as with objectives, they are taught as and when they are relevant the the child's involvement in the real tasks of reading and writing. Then I can model and support writing as a constant and complex system of decision making and problem solving with all of the resources learners have available.
THESE ARE NOT OBJECTIVES!!!
Weekly planner for instructional reading and writing sessions (the children are grouped according to strategy need)
The marking key guide below is to make your life easier. Use highlighters to select one part of the work you like (write why) and one part for their attention. Expect that this will be fixed (or at least looked at again) by them before you see them next. This template is the coding sheet to go in the front of their book, I use pink for (I like) and green for (look again). The children editing their own and their buddies work with a yellow highlighter.